


If You're Lost

by wildwinterwitch



Series: Driftwood [1]
Category: Broadchurch, True Love (TV)
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Series 1 Episode 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-22
Updated: 2013-03-22
Packaged: 2017-12-06 03:51:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/731159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildwinterwitch/pseuds/wildwinterwitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alec and Holly meet on the beach at Broadchurch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You're Lost

**Author's Note:**

> This ficlet is set after episode three of Broadchurch and the Holly story in True Love by Dominic Savage.

Holly dropped her bag onto the hard sand and took a deep breath. She could feel the icy glare of the scruffy man occupying the bus shelter up at the pier. If he was enjoying the scenery, she was probably marring it but she couldn’t care less.

Her hands were shaking. They had started shaking at the hospital, and hadn’t stopped since. By now, Karen must be gone. She could feel it, the cold, spreading inside her; emanating from the hollow that had been growing around her heart ever since the diagnosis.

She bit her lower lip, ducking her head, not bothering with the locks of hair the stiff breeze was tearing out of her messy bun. It was chasing the storm clouds away; it wouldn’t chase away her grief yet for a while.

Never in her life had Holly felt so lonely. She and Karen had only been here a couple of months before Karen's horrible headaches had begun. And before they could turn round, or even build a life for themselves, she was gone. There was no life left for her in Broadchurch now, and Holly felt adrift. Turning around, she gazed at the shrine the people had erected to poor Danny. He’d been to her art club once or twice. He'd been a bit reluctant to fully join, and he didn't seem to know what to do with all the supplies and his imagination.

Everyone was mourning him.

“Such a tragedy,” the head would say to Karen’s death. _Another one in such a short time_. And, _Death comes in threes_ , she’d once heard characters say on an American medical drama. Who was next, she wondered?

She certainly did feel dead inside. Karen’s parents hadn’t allowed her near their daughter. Ever since the diagnosis they had claimed that the tumour clouded Karen’s judgement, that she wasn’t really in love with Holly. They hadn’t allowed her near Karen until Karen had put her foot down. It was a goodbye every time Holly left for the day. Yesterday had been the day.

Holly dug her sketch book out of her bag and began to capture the seascape in broad strokes using Karen’s water-soluble graphite pencils. She’d loved them.

When the tears began to fall, they added their bit to the picture taking shape on her knees.

-:-

Alec groaned when the young woman with the wild hair and the over-sized parka dropped onto the sand before him. Today of all days he’d hoped he’d have the beach to himself.

The doctor’s words had shaken him more than he’d let on, and after he’d left, he’d dug in his pockets for the bottle of pills and swallowed one of them dry. The pain in his gullet had been good, and he’d felt better almost at once.

This was such a bloody mess already, and he couldn’t see an end to it. And of course bloody Karen bloody White had to turn up, of all people. But she wasn’t going to wreck this for him like she had Sandbrook. He was going to find Danny’s murderer as a penance to the families he had let down. This time, there wasn’t going to be any mistake, nothing that would make the case vulnerable.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” he groaned when he saw the woman produce a largish sketchbook and a pencil case from her bag. “Bloody artists.”

Dropping his head back against the wood of the shelter, he closed his eyes, picturing the flaking paint sticking to his hair. To make things worse, “Call me Ellie” Miller had invited him round to her place for dinner. She’d made no secret of the fact that she loathed the idea, and he’d been so startled that he hadn’t know quite what to say. He should have said no. This was wrong on so many levels. But it was what people did, wasn’t it? And he had to do it. As if _he_ were people.

“Hang on,” he murmured, looking up.

She was an artist. She was sketching the beach. Now facing away from the cliffs and the tents over the site where Danny’s body had been found, but what if she’d painted something else? He wondered if she was any good.

He stood and, hands buried in the pockets of his dark trench coat, sauntered across the pier and down the sandy slope to where she was sitting.

-:-

Damn but she _was_ good.

“Hello,” he said, crouching beside her. A gust of wind blew her dark blonde hair into his face and he turned away. He caught a whiff of her perfume. Something… flowery. Warm. Feminine.

“Sorry,” she said, shocked, gathering a fistful of her hair and easing an elastic around it in an attempt to tame it. The breeze was rather stiff down here. She had fixed the sheets of her sketchbook with several foldback clips, he noted.

“Do you paint round here often?”

“Drawing.”

“Sorry?”

“I’m using graphite pencils, so it’s drawing,” she explained.

Bloody hell. “Aye. So. Do you?”

“I come round here now and then, yeah,” she said.

Her mascara was smeared. He wondered why she’d been crying. She wasn’t drawing the shrine to Danny, at any rate.

“But I haven’t seen anything to do with Danny,” she said. “Aren’t you…?”

He groaned inwardly and closed his eyes. Of course she’d recognise him. 

“I saw you on the telly,” she said softly.

“You sure you haven’t seen anything?”

“Yeah.”

“Right.” He climbed to his feet, dizzy for a moment after the fast change in altitude.

“Are you all right?”

“I could ask you the same,” he retorted, intrigued, for some reason, by her tears. He hated tears. They made him feel helpless and inadequate, but this young woman’s tears were different for some reason.

“It’s freezing,” he said. “Care for a cuppa?” He remembered Miller’s thermos from the night before. It had touched him, but he’d not admit that, of course.

“Yeah.”


End file.
